No option —abortion panel head
PA Wellington) The new chairman of the' Abortion Supervisory Com-! mittee. Mrs Vivienne Boyd, of Lower Hutt, believes she! has no option but to take’: the controversial job. Mrs Boyd, who is presi-i dent of the National Council! of Women, said yesterday that she had strong opinions on women’s assuming responsibility in the community. "If I am going to urge other women to do it. I have to be prepared to do it myself. That was the reason I took the job." she said. Her appointment was ratified in Parliament yesterday. It was first announced by the Minister of Justice (Mr McLay) in a Notice of Motion on Thursday. Mrs Boyd will take over from an Auckland Magistrate, Mrs Augusta Wallace, |S.M„ who said when she resigned that her successor should be “unfettered by traditional restraints and be well versed in political strattagem and expediencey.” Mrs Boyd, referring to ! Mrs Wallace's statement, said that she hoped she .would not have to indulge in i expediency, but she was i aware of its existence. Her connection with the women’s movement had been long enough to make her aware of the pressures, she said.
She is an active member of the National Council of Women, which has polled its : members on abortion, and I the Committee on Women, I but said that she did not have a view on the subject and had never taken a public stance on it.
“I feel very sympathetic towards any woman faced with deciding whether to have an abortion, so 1 would not want to make that decision any more difficult than it otherwise would be,” Mrs Boyd said. “The law should interfere as little as possible in the private decision, as a general proposition,” she said. Mrs Boyd declined to say whether the committee’s course would change under her leadership.
The Auckland chairman of the Abortion Law Reform Association (Mr A. Aitken) has described Mrs Boyd’s appointment as “a further waste of taxpayers’ money” because a lawyer would have to be employed to help her. Mr Aitken said that Mrs Boyd had no legal training and the proposal to appoint a lawyer as counsel was just adding to the bureaucracy of the Contraception, Sterilisation, and Abortion Act.
No option —abortion panel head
Press, 8 September 1979, Page 3
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